Madelon eBook

“I am not angry, but I encourage no woman to
be false to her betrothal vows,” he said, and
strove to make his voice hard; but Dorothy bent her
head, and the sobs came, and he took her in his arms.

“Are you angry with me?” Dorothy sobbed,
piteously, against his breast.

“No, not with you, but myself,” said Eugene.
“It is all with myself. I will take the
blame of it all, sweet,” and he smoothed her
hair and kissed her and held her close and tried to
comfort her; and it seemed to him that he could indeed
take all the blame of her inconstancy and distrust,
and could even bear his self-reproach for her sake,
so much he loved her.

“I would not have married Burr—­even
if—­he had told me—­he was innocent,”
Dorothy said, after a while. She was hushing her
sobs, and her very soul was smiling within her for
joy as Eugene’s fond whispers reached her ears.

“Why?” said Eugene.

“Because—­you came first—­when
you looked at me in the meeting-house,” Dorothy
whispered back. Then she suddenly lifted her
face a little, and looked up at him, with one soft
flushed cheek crushed against his breast, and Eugene
bent his face down to hers. They stood so, and
for a minute had, indeed, the whole world to their
two selves, for love as well as death has the power
of annihilation; and then there was a stir in the
lane, a crisp rustle of petticoats and a hiss of whispering
voices; and they started and fell apart. There
in the lane before them, their eyes as keen as foxes,
with the scent of curiosity and gossip, their cheeks
red with the shame of it, and their lips forming into
apologetic and terrified smiles, stood Margaret Bean
and two others—­the tavern-keeper’s
wife and the wife of the man who kept the village
store.

For a second the three women fairly cowered beneath
Eugene Hautville’s eyes, and Margaret Bean began
to stammer as if her old tongue were palsied.
Then Eugene collected himself, made them one of his
courtly bows, turned to Dorothy with another, offered
her his arm, and walked away with her out of the lane,
before the eyes of the prying gossips.

Chapter XXVII

It was four o’clock that summer afternoon when
the three women—­Margaret Bean, the tavern-keeper’s
wife, and the storekeeper’s wife—­who
had followed Dorothy and Eugene into the lane to pry
upon them set forth to communicate by word of mouth
the scandalous proceedings they had witnessed; and
long before midnight all the village knew. The
women crept cautiously at a good distance behind Dorothy
and Eugene out of the lane, and watched, with incredulous
eyes turning to each other for confirmation, the pair
walk into Parson Fair’s house together.
Then they could do no more, since their ears were
not long enough, and each went her way to tell what
she had seen.

All the neighbors knew when Eugene Hautville left
Parson Fair’s house that afternoon, but their
knowledge stopped there. Nobody ever discovered
just what was said within those four walls when Dorothy—­who,
soft plumaged though she was, had flown in the faces
of all her decorous feminine antecedents and her goodly
teaching—­confronted her father with her
new lover at her side.